Today, the PT Group presented during a Press Conference held at the Alcochete Secondary School, the PT Schools project – The Adventure of Knowledge. The presentation was made by Miguel Horta e Costa, Executive Chairman of the PT Group, in the presence of the groups executive commission and the Minister of Public Works, Communication and Transport and the Assistance Secretary of State and Education, Mário Lino Correia and Jorge Pedreira.
Ambitious and original, this project is aimed to fight the info-exclusion and contribute to the education of information technology of an entire generation aged between 12 and 18, namely in the use of the Internet as a learning and knowledge tool.
The project came about with the proof that youngsters see the Internet mainly as a means of entertainment and not as a tool to access education contents. This reality, together with the fact that Portugal has a low penetration rate of computers at home, transforms a school into an even more privileged contact with the Internet and technologies that they support.
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The target market for PT School, which becomes even more important as this is the Year of European Citizenship for Education, is the school community, including parents and teachers, but mainly students of the 7th to the 12th grade of the 1600 schools throughout the country.
Just as Miguel Horta e Costa said “it is of Portugal Telecom’s understanding that the company will gain just as much as the country will and the educational system will also will with the introduction of new information technologies and the Internet as part of the education process”. With this, a protocol was signed between PT and the Ministry of Education which recognises the initiative in public interest.
On the other hand, the Assistance Secretary of State and of Education, Jorge Pedreira, highlighted that “this project fights info-exclusion and gives knowledge to the society and information to all students. It is a big initiative and a bet for a better future in our country”.
The PT School project developed itself through various initiatives: an online portal, the turma.sapo.pt with educational contents and a national competition on the Internet; a tour throughout the country which is already on the road and which will visit all the district capitals; and a television competition, which will go on the air during the months of May and June, transmitted by RTP. These initiatives act in a complementary manner and in all of them, appeals to the participation of youngsters and the test of their capabilities of navigating on the Internet.
At the end, there will be a final on the television. Te winning team of this final, will take to their school, the PT School of the Future.
PT helps a generation get the most out of the Internet
The competition was the best way found to get youngsters involved, appealing to competition and an entertaining dimension that will move them, while awarding them for their intelligent use of good research practices and use of Internet.
The students take part in teams of five. The best team from each district is chosen for the TV final. The best team wins, in the television final, a portable computer, trips and scholarship for higher education. The winning team will also take you their school, the PT School of the Future, which will be installed, free of charge by Portugal Telecom at the end of the school year.
The installed equipment will belong to the school. Up until now, in the scope of the tour, the districts of Vila Real, Bragança, Viana do Castelo, Aveiro, Évora, Guarda, Castelo Branco and Santarém, Beja and Setúbal have already been visited.
The next visit will take place tomorrow, the 19th of April in Funchal. Until the end of the 14th of May, the entire country will be visited and the teams which will go onto the television competition will be selected.
Up until today, there is no school with these characteristics in Europe. PT Schools and its main development, the PT School of the Future, is an original initiative which surpasses all valid experiences which have been developed in the scope to integrate new technologies in a schooling environment, in Portugal and throughout the world.
In order to carry this out, the team responsible for PT School followed projects carried out in Palo Alto in California, New Zealand, Finland and France where some experiments for the introduction of communication and information technologies have been developed in schools. In none of these places has a proposal been made to take things this far. The project, which was born nine months ago, counts on the help of a team of personalities which makes up their Advisory Committee: Prof. Prof. Eduardo Marçal Grilo, Prof. Roberto Carneiro, Dr. Luís Nazaré and the child psychiatrist Dra. Maria Luís Borges de Castro.
The PT School of the Future: What is it?
What if there were a school where all of the students had their own computer? Where they didn’t have to be weighed down with book, but instead downloaded their notes onto a laptop? What if homework was assisted by an on-line tutor? And what if the parents had a network computer with the school and could talk to the teachers? And what if the grades were received via SMS? All of this can finally be possible…
Portugal Telecom will offer the country a PT School of the Future. It is the most visible initiative of the PT Schools project. An innovative school, integrated information technologies in a schooling environment, capable of carrying out pedagogical work, which surpasses all of the experiments carried out until today.
The equipment offered by Portugal Telecom will belong to the school of the winning team. PT will give to that school:
Computers for every classroom;
Intelligent Electronic Board, tactile, in each classroom, with the capacity to navigate on the Internet, record teacher’s notes and summaries and download that information to the students computers;
A server which will allow each student and teacher to have an eemail account and enrolment of a specific school Messenger;
Installation of a School Management System, which includes information platforms for the teaching staff, students and educators;
The creation of a portal and a school Intranet;
The necessary equipment to allow for the use of the SMS service as a contact tool between educators and the school;
Multimedia kiosks spread out through strategic locations which will allow for the consultation of information for the schooling community;
Wi-Fi coverage throughout the whole school so as to offer total broadband mobility;
A “mediateca” which can be consulted both from school and from home, where information regarding the main producers of the current contents is stored;
Free installation of broadband Internet access in student and teaching staff homes.